The Hard Reality

            Like waking up from a college hangover the day of finals, the Aeros’ loss last night has hit us all pretty hard. The tears are dried, the ice cream eaten, and the trip to the therapist scheduled. The depression has finally sunk in, and reading through the Tweets are more knives in the chest as we begin to deal with the hard reality that hockey in Houston has come to an end. Though we all hope to have hockey return again soon to the city of Houston, I believe every fan will agree, it will never be the same.

            Assuming Houston keeps the name “Aeros” if/when a hockey team returns (because honestly, what else would we call them at this point?), what would change? Obviously they wouldn’t be the same team anymore, we’d have to rebuild from scratch…again. But, with a new team, comes new changes, and we might not like these changes. I know right now we’re all saying we just want hockey to come back to Houston soon, and we do, but what we really want is the AEROS to come back to Houston. We’ll always remember the Aeros as the team with one of the ugliest color combinations that somehow managed to work anyways, the team with a bomber for its logo, and with man’s best friend and the fan favorite mascot. Sure we all can appreciate the throwback blue and white jerseys from the days of Gordie Howe, but I think we can all agree that green is more our style. But like this move, none of this is up to us. Aeros fans are at the mercy of the hockey gods, the same ones that have turned their backs and let the hockey antichrist slay a 40 year old team in cold blood.

Getting all of our goodbyes out now, we want to wish the very best to our final roster to have success wherever they may go. We’ll miss crazy-eyed Drew Bagnall, the man who wore the “C” for the last time, and we’ll miss Darcy Kuemper, the sunshine kid who was a shutout king in the net. We’ll miss Fonzie, who’s missing all his teeth, and Phillips whose hair is the envy of the gods. We’ll miss Connelly who wouldn’t stop drop-passing the freaking puck, and Medvec who probably took a wrestling class in high school. We’ll miss Rau who was always smacking his gum, and McIntyre who’s always smacking his mouth. We’ll miss Bulmer who shamefully listens to Justin Bieber, and McMillan who isn’t much better listening to Nicki Minaj. We’ll miss Granlund being Finnish Baby Jesus, and Haula for being second Finnish Baby Jesus with an awesome name. We’ll miss Grantham who I swear was always making faces at me during warmups, and DaSilva whose smile made me swoon. We’ll miss Foucalt who finally returned to the ice, and Dumba who was just joining us on it. We’ll miss Mara, Vellieux, and Mister Jake Hockey himself for being the best trio of veterans to bless our roster at the end of the season…and also for their on ice shenanigans that we’ll remember forever (we have pictures). We’ll miss Mike Condon, who kept our hopes alive after we lost three other goalies to injury and whose phenomenal performance should not be overshadowed by last night’s loss. And last, but certainly not least, we'll miss Aero Joe who was the voice of the Aeros (literally) and although he may no have been on the ice, he was certainly a part of the team. I'd like to personally thank Joe for being the one to say goodbye for the Aeros despite the crushing emotion that came along with doing so; thank you Joe, we wouldn't have wanted to hear goodbye from anyone else.

            The reality is hard to absorb, but it’s definitely sinking its teeth in. The Aeros are gone, and what is to come, if anything, may never be the same. As we wish our team the best of luck in hockey cursed Iowa, we can’t help but feel like the little kid that wishes they could’ve done more to keep mommy and daddy together. Aeros fans are lost without their team, and our efforts to hold onto them were too little too late. We can only hope that we learn from this lesson and do our best to bring back, and hold onto, hockey in the future; because I don’t believe we can handle losing our team another time.